The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  She wondered how Martha felt about going back home. She would ask her later, when things had settled, when she wasn’t so angry. That might take years.

  A week later, Tilly arrived at Martha’s house bright and early and they packed up the house. Colin’s civvies were bundled off to the Salvation Army—Tilly had to work hard to convince Martha not to burn everything out in the street—and neighbours had loaned them suitcases for the boys to fill with their few possessions. Three watersiders from the union turned up with a truck and they loaded up the beds, the kitchen table and chairs, a sideboard that had been filled with photograph albums and a few pieces of good china and glassware, the settee and the wireless and headed home to Argyle Place.

  Tilly wondered if the boys would grow to love the household routines that she and Martha had grown up with, routines that hadn’t changed in all the years since then. Monday was still washing day and Elsie would spend all day feeding the fire under the copper in the backyard so it boiled their clothes until they were clean, before feeding every piece through the mangle that Tilly was still fearful of. When Stan wasn’t working and was around to help with the household chores, he’d liked to feed the mangle himself, scaring Tilly by pretending that it had sucked his arm in between the rollers. No doubt the boys would be as perplexed as Tilly still was about Elsie’s daily practice of sweeping the front steps precisely before ten o’clock each morning, or there would be trouble. And after the sweeping, she would have her second cup of tea and read the afternoon newspaper from the day before.

  When Tilly had reminded her mother that yesterday’s news belonged to yesterday, Elsie had shrugged and said, ‘It’s all still news to me and this way I can read yesterday’s horoscope and see if it came true, can’t I?’

  So much had changed for the members of the family from Argyle Place, yet so much was now the same. Tilly and Martha had lost their husbands. Stan was still at war with the bosses.

  And Elsie was still keeping her entire family together.

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘Hello, doctor. It’s Dear Agatha here from the Daily Herald. I’m very well, thank you. Do you have a minute? I have a tricky one today. A lady has written seeking some advice about urination. Yes.’

  At the desk next along, Tilly leant back in her chair and listened in as Dear Agatha murmured sympathetically, her pencil sweeping over her notebook.

  Since she’d returned to work, Tilly had moved desks and was now in a cluster with Dear Agatha, Vera Maxwell and Kitty Darling. Police reporter Maggie Pritchard and courts reporter Frances Langley had moved their desks opposite each other at the other end of the newsroom. They found it useful to be closer so they could compare notes: someone Maggie wrote about on a Monday might be the subject of Frances’s yarn on the Tuesday.

  ‘Is that so?’ Dear Agatha replied, her voice rising at the end of her question. ‘She writes that the irritation arises when she urinates and that there’s increased frequency. And there’s some discharge as well.’

  Tilly had always assumed that Dear Agatha simply invented the advice she provided to Sydney’s lovelorn and itching and bereft. When she’d worked up in the main newsroom the men had read out the questions—and Dear Agatha’s answers—for sport over morning tea. When the male reporters had invented their own creative and debauched solutions for what ailed female letter writers, Tilly had tuned it out with quick bursts of typing.

  In the past week, she’d seen for herself just how much research it actually took. Dear Agatha had a contact book filled with the telephone numbers of doctors and nurses and even a psychiatrist, who regularly provided her with advice on how she might craft replies to the letters. Tilly hadn’t until now understood the sheer volume of them, hundreds each week, delivered in boxes directly to Dear Agatha’s desk by ambitious young copyboys.

  Her skill was in distilling the professionals’ knowledge into something that was easily understood by the letter writer and by other readers of the column.

  ‘Oh, dear. Thank you, doctor. Talk soon.’ Dear Agatha sighed before slipping fresh copy paper and carbons into her typewriter.

  ‘Is it the clap?’ Tilly asked.

  Dear Agatha frowned at Tilly. ‘Gonorrhoea, he says, with those symptoms. She needs a dose of penicillin and so does her husband.’

  ‘Poor woman.’

  ‘Poor woman indeed. I have to edit this part of her letter—we’re a family newspaper after all—but she says here—’ Dear Agatha reached for the letter. ‘She says here she was faithful to her husband the whole war and she’s only had the symptoms since he’s come home. He was in the Middle East.’ Dear Agatha raised her eyebrows. ‘What do you think happened?’

  ‘I’m supposing he brought something home with him that he didn’t carry in his kit bag.’

  ‘Yes. My pox doctor just now told me that in the First World War, there was an epidemic of it on the Western Front. Nearly fifty-thousand cases and it took six weeks in hospital back then to cure it. Thank god for penicillin.’

  ‘Why didn’t this woman go to the doctor instead of writing to you? It sounds incredibly painful.’

  Dear Agatha sighed. ‘Imagine what that’s like, Tilly? Men don’t get the blame for giving VD to their wives and girlfriends. The women are the guilty ones in these cases. And I don’t know if this correspondent even has a husband, to tell the truth. But that hardly matters. If she’s married she’s suffering and if she’s a single girl she’s likely scared witless. If she did tell her doctor she’ll likely get a stern lecture about her own moral cowardice. Or worse. She could be locked up.’

  Tilly nearly fell backwards out of her chair. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s true.’ Dear Agatha’s eyes narrowed and her lips were a thin line. ‘Back in ’42 Canberra passed new laws. Wait a minute. I’ll find the name.’ Dear Agatha lifted a folder from her desk and flicked through pages and pages of news clippings. ‘Ah, here it is. Listen to this. They’re the National Security (Venereal Diseases and Contraception) Regulations and they gave health authorities the power to detain and medically examine people suspected of being carriers of VD.’

  Tilly was flabbergasted. ‘That’s horrifying, Agatha.’

  ‘Too right. And guess who they locked up?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Oh yes. It gets worse.’ Dear Agatha stabbed a page with her index finger. ‘Our own health minister said, and I quote, “It is in the power of women to banish venereal disease by denying men the opportunity for irregular intercourse, and by refusing to allow their moral sense to be blunted by alcohol”.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake. What a lot of rot.’

  ‘And that’s not all, Tilly. The Australian Medical Journal said young women weren’t exhibiting enough self-control and were giving in to illicit company, easy money and a good time, luring men into deviant practices and having babies out of wedlock. They were destroying the spiritual and moral values of the country.’

  Tilly wondered how on earth they all had the time for all this society-destroying behaviour while raising children on their own, volunteering for the war, working six days a week in factories, heading off to the country to work in the Land Army or donning uniforms for positions in the defence forces.

  ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,’ Tilly huffed.

  ‘And I suppose you weren’t aware either that the 8th Special Hospital in Palestine was the AIF’s main VD treatment centre. They even had specialist venereologists.’

  ‘Is that who you were talking to just now?’

  ‘I will never reveal my sources, Tilly.’ Dear Agatha played at being horrified, positioned her fingers over her typewriter keys and began. ‘Dear Worried of Woolloomooloo. How dreadful for you that you have suffered in silence but the time for silence is over. I would urge you to seek medical advice from a friendly doctor immediately for your own health.’ She turned to Tilly. ‘I’ll write her a note with the name of my pox doctor. He’s offered to help.’

  Tilly w
ondered about the secrets men kept. Who would want to admit to a wife or a family that they’d been laid up in hospital in Palestine with the clap? Where was the honour and courage in that? So a soldier’s secret becomes his wife’s and then Dear Agatha’s and the doctor’s and so on and so on. It was indeed a tangled web, in which everyone was the prey.

  She had been complicit in keeping the secrets of men. The indiscretions she’d overheard in the newsroom all the years she worked up on the third floor. The stories she’d heard on the women’s correspondents’ tour about important men in Sydney, those in positions of power and authority who had abused it.

  And nothing looked about to change, Tilly thought. The war might well be over but all around her things seemed the same as they ever were.

  Strike settlement talks were continuing between BHP and the Federal Government, with miners claiming BHP was deliberately inflicting a black Christmas on the Australian people, and BHP countering with claims of industrial thuggery on the part of the communist unions. Chifley was refusing to order the striking miners back to work, winning acclaim from other unions, while Sydneysiders and businesses were enduring electricity rationing to cope with the reduced supply. Hospitals had discharged more than five hundred patients in case of power failure. Paddington housewives were drawing up rosters for their neighbours to share their fuel coppers so the washing could still be done. An immediate ban had been placed on the sale of car tyres because power restrictions had stopped production. Supplies of canned meat were running low, half the theatres in New South Wales were closed and Berlei, the corset manufacturer, was predicting that the tremendous demand for foundation garments would go unmet as production had also been closed down. Word was that Chifley’s office at Parliament House was being powered by hurricane lanterns and candles, in solidarity with the strikers, and the Daily Herald was producing smaller, emergency issues of the paper to conserve light and power.

  Some forms of rationing were still in place, including petrol, which had put a dampener on many families’ plans for a holiday on the coast or to the country. And those who were travelling by train were now having to contend with train cancellations and crowded carriages and restricted timetables due to the coal shortage, so Sydneysiders had decided to stay home for a quiet one.

  Many diggers still hadn’t returned home and others remained in hospital. There were funerals for those who’d succumbed to their wounds. The idea of celebrating Christmas, this first festive season in which she and the world finally knew she was a widow, seemed like an anathema to Tilly. Her grief was still too fresh and her feeling of loss too profound and complex to want to celebrate anything. Her city was looking to Christmas in a similarly subdued fashion, not feeling comfortable showing joy when so many were experiencing grief. What did she have to drink to?

  The idea of offering toasts to absent loved ones was too much for some to bear, and who could blame them for not wanting to celebrate at all. Tilly knew her mother was already planning her traditional Christmas lunch. She’d been carefully feeding one of her young chooks to fatten it up for roasting, and it was only a couple of days away from its demise. When Tilly had exhibited a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the prospect, her mother had been horrified.

  ‘We’ll celebrate because Archie can’t, love. We’ll drink a toast to him and all you’ve lost. We still have each other. That’s what I’ll be celebrating.’

  Christmas lunch would be more important than ever this year with Martha and her boys living back at Argyle Place. At least in the bosom of her family, Tilly could spirit herself away if she needed to have a cry. Her father and his union comrades didn’t have much to celebrate either, having been pilloried for their strikes and blamed when talks with Chifley had broken down. When it had been announced that there would be power restrictions in the lead-up to Christmas because the coalminers supplying coal to Bunnerong power station were on strike, the grumbles had intensified. A victory for striking workers looked further away than ever.

  Tilly had ignored the turning of the days on the calendar as the twenty-fifth grew closer. In the years their husbands had been away, Tilly and Mary had created a Christmas tree from pussy willow branches Mary had collected from the streets around Potts Point. They’d wrapped the jumpers they’d knitted for Bert and Archie and sat them under their makeshift tree. In the months leading up, they’d made fruit cakes, bought aftershave and shaving cream and new toothbrushes and packed everything up in brown paper and sent them off marked with their husbands’ names in clear print with the words prisoner of war underneath, to be sent off to the Red Cross for distribution.

  Now Tilly knew that nothing had ever reached Archie or Bert. What had happened to all the clothes and cakes and love letters and declarations and heartbreak collected between each line of those letters? Were they in a warehouse somewhere, a collective gathering of pain and suffering, bleeding tears into the ground beneath? Had rats and mice devoured all the fruit cake or had she and Mary and tens of thousands of other Australian women been inadvertently feeding the Japanese instead of their husbands?

  Tilly was struggling to find much to celebrate and the prospect of 1946 loomed, filled with nothing but a series of obstacles she would have to overcome. What to do about her new job. Mary and Bert. Where she might live if they found a place of their own. Martha and her boys and their future. Her father’s ailing health and his prospects of ever finding work again. Her mother’s determined stoicism, which Tilly knew couldn’t last forever.

  Out of the corner of her eye, something caught her attention. She stopped staring out the streaked windows across the newsroom and saw Mrs Freeman take up position by Vera’s desk. The editor cleared her throat and it sounded portentous.

  Her reporters, as well as Maggie and Frances, looked up from their typing.

  Mrs Freeman held her hands together at her waist waiting for everyone to listen in. ‘I have an announcement to make.’

  ‘I hope it’s to do with Christmas and that extra week off we’ve been promised,’ Vera called out. There was a general murmur of approval at that idea. It was the end of a long year and before that, a long war, and so many had been looking to Christmas to put a firm full stop on all of it. It should have been an exhale of breath for all those who’d been holding theirs for so long, but it hadn’t brought the immediate new chapter people had been hoping for. The first peacetime Christmas was shaping up to be anything but peaceful.

  She realised with a start that she hadn’t been listening to Mrs Freeman and focussed her attention on her editor.

  ‘Is she unwell?’ Dear Agatha asked.

  ‘There’s something going around,’ Vera added. ‘A nasty cold, I hear.’

  Tilly whispered to Dear Agatha, ‘Who’s unwell?’

  ‘Kitty,’ Mrs Freeman answered Tilly directly. ‘She’s needing to take some time off.’

  ‘She’s not in trouble, is she?’ Maggie called out, blowing the smoke from her Woodbine into the air. She and Frances exchanged knowing glances.

  Trouble? Tilly studied Maggie and Frances and their suddenly solemn expressions. Was anything about human behaviour a shock to them?

  Mrs Freeman’s mouth twitched and she pursed her lips to hide it. ‘For goodness sake, Maggie. She’s not wanted by the police. She’ll be back in six months. About May. Or June. She’s not certain yet. My point in telling you is that I need someone to fill her position doing Talk of the Town. I thought I’d offer it to everyone here before I look outside the paper.’

  Tilly wanted to shrink under her desk. She looked around at her colleagues. Maggie would never be moved from her police round, neither would Frances from courts. Vera’s cookery column was more popular than ever and the flood of letters to Dear Agatha surely would keep her safe. That left Tilly as the most likely candidate to temporarily fill Kitty’s role.

  ‘No volunteers?’ Mrs Freeman asked. Everyone seemed suddenly fascinated with their notebooks. Talk of the Town was a gossip column and it had suited Kitty perfectly, movi
ng as she did in Sydney’s fanciest circles. The idea of being assigned to it filled Tilly with utter despair. When Mrs Freeman glided up to her desk, Tilly looked up at her with resignation. She needed this job. She would do what she must, even if she couldn’t tell the Marquis of Milford Haven from the Duke of Gloucester.

  ‘I’ll do whatever you need, Mrs Freeman.’ Tilly bit the inside of her lip. She couldn’t take the words back now.

  Mrs Freeman considered Tilly for a moment. ‘Thank you. I appreciate that.’ She patted Tilly on the shoulder. ‘There will be a few things I’ll need you to attend to while we find someone to fill in on a longer-term basis.’

  ‘You mean it won’t be forever?’ Tilly asked.

  ‘For goodness sake, no,’ Mrs Freeman scoffed.

  Tilly couldn’t hide her enormous sigh of relief.

  ‘Do you know anyone around the traps who perhaps might be interested, Tilly?’ Mrs Freeman paused. ‘From one of the other papers, I mean? Perhaps a girl looking for an upgrade?’

  Tilly’s mind whirred. ‘As a matter of fact, I know Denise Stapleton from The Sun pretty well. I can ask if she knows anyone over there.’

  ‘Terrific. Let me know as soon as you have a name or two. Now tell me, what are you working on?’

  Tilly reached for her notebook and stood respectfully. ‘There’s a rush on for tinned food with a photo from a grocery counter showing a long queue of housewives, and Miss Australia, Rhondda Kelly from Queensland, and the other finalists will be riding through the city this afternoon on an amphibious duck from the aircraft carrier Implacable.’

  ‘Do as good a job as you can,’ Mrs Freeman said as she rolled her eyes and turned to Vera. ‘What’s cooking, Vera?’

  She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘A Christmas Garland Cake and an assortment of savouries. Cheese toasted savoury rolls, salted crackers and devilled bread crisps.’

  ‘Can I have copies?’ Dear Agatha asked. ‘Anything will be better than boiled mutton.’